Arquitectura – FAUTL

Building or the art of fiction

“Writing in architecture is a form of architecture. And when is not, which is most of the time, its just a bore.Writing can’t be a reflection of building. If anything it should be a distortion. It takes something we think we know and presents it differently. It creates a new thing. A fiction. For writing to anticipate or contribute to the going beyond of architecture it has to go beyond itself, to reach even if just for a moment a state of insanity, of delirium. Going beyond architecture will mean going beyond it’s routinely pompous discourse, the self-aggrandizing statements that disguise it’s feeling of inconsequence. Now, that even our dentists suddenly thinks that architecture is important, we should embrace its irrelevance. Architecture should learn from fiction. Fiction is always beyond itself. Fiction is irreverent and irrelevant. Its power comes from this. When architecture goes beyond itself, whether in a project or a text, it becomes fiction. Loos’s writing are never boring. Le Corbusier’s projects arrived from different planet. Kiesler never had his feet on the ground. Buckminster Fuller was a Professor of Poetry at Harvard. The Eameses concocted miraculous stories. The Smithsons perfected the art of irrelevant. ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ turned commerce into manifesto. ‘Delirious New York’ was the last time we laughed. If Mies said ‘I desire the absence of architecture and I practice the art of building’ today we should say ‘I desire the absence of comfort and I practice the art of fiction.”